Israel: an apartheid state?

BISHOP DESMOND TUTU, the South African Nobel Prize winner, described how he saw on his visit to Israel “much like what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about” (1). Comparisons between apartheid South Africa and Israel/Palestine have often been made, but not always clearly explained. Many factors have made the comparison attractive.

The first, perhaps most important, is the historical colonialist foundation of the two conflicts. White settlers in South Africa, like Zionist pioneers, colonised a land already inhabited. As in South Africa, the settlers in Palestine expelled the indigenous population, some two-thirds of the Palestinians in the land that became Israel in 1948, took possession of their properties and legally segregated those who remained.

However, admitting that Israel’s foundation was colonialist does not mean that it is compar able to apartheid South Africa. As Gershon Shafir, a leading Israeli sociologist, has noted, while both conflicts were about control of the land, they took place in different historical and economic conditions that had an impact on their evolution and their relation to the natives (2).

White South Africans and Israelis dealt differently with the indigenous demographic reality. In Palestine the Zionist project wanted to negate the idea of a native non-Jewish population, coining the phrase “people without a land for a land without a people” (3). It sought to establish Jewish demographic dominance by expelling Palestin ians and preventing structural dependence on the Palestinian economy, particularly on its labour. Before 1948 fewer than a third of the workers in the Jewish sector were Palestinian (4). From 1948-67, the remaining Palestinian Arabs supplied no more than 15% of the labour force (5).

(3) The idea of expulsion, or transfer, of the indigenous population was fundamental to Zionism since its inception. See N Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: the Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1984, Institute of Palestine Studies, Washington DC, 1991.

(10) A Kerby, South Africa’s Bantustans: What Independence for the Transkei, World Council of Churches , Geneva, 1987.

(11) According to the agreement signed in Oslo at the end of September 1995, area A (3% of the West Bank) was under autonomous Palestinian jurisdiction; area B (27%) was run jointly, and area C (73%) was ruled by the Israelis. See L’Atlas du Monde diplomatique, Paris, 2003.